Sajid Javid has quietly abandoned plans to ban high-powered military-grade rifles after dozens of hard Brexit Conservatives and the DUP came together to voice opposition to the Home Office plan.

The police had wanted to ban .50- or higher-calibre weapons – which can immobilise a vehicle or truck from a mile away – and Labour was ready to support the government to get the ban through parliament despite the Tory rebellion.

But the home secretary has changed his mind amid the lobbying and on Friday put down an amendment to the offensive weapons bill going before the Commons next Wednesday, reversing the ban the government had proposed.

Louise Haigh, Labour’s shadow policing and crime minister, said: “Senior officers have warned the police have no known protection against these destructive weapons and yet ministers have still caved in to their restive backbenchers.”

Sixty-nine MPs had signed an amendment demanding a reversal of the ban, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, the chairman of the hard Brexit European Research group, as well as Steve Baker, Sir Bill Cash and Nadine Dorries.

ERG members were looking for the opportunity to stage a show of strength in parliament to demonstrate they also had the numbers to block Theresa May’s final deal Brexit deal when it comes to parliament in mid-December.

Police forces support the ban on .50-calibre guns, which the National Crime Agency says have the power to immobilise a light or medium-size vehicle or truck at 1,800 metres and are too powerful to be used for sporting purposes.

Similar weapons were used by the IRA against British soldiers and members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the 1990s.

Mark Groothuis, the national firearms licensing liaison officer for counter-terrorism policing, had told MPs during the bill’s committee stages that he was concerned that “if one of these guns were to be stolen, again with the ammunition, and if it were to get into terrorist hands, it could be very difficult to fight against or to protect against”.

There are 129 rifles of .50-calibre held under licence in England and Wales, mainly to be fired on Ministry of Defence ranges in long-range shooting competitions. Critics of the proposed ban have said that no .50 weapon has been used in a crime in the UK since the IRA disarmed.

The ban was intended to apply to rifles with a power of “over 13,600 joules at the muzzle”. It was also opposed by the DUP, which is supposed to be supporting May’s government, and the Labour MP Kate Hoey.

Nothing particularly to worry about I don’t think, but if it is one day used in a crime or terrorist act (and then inevitably banned) you’ll know where to pinpoint the moment something could have been done about it. These things have a funny habit of coming back to haunt them years later.

Guardian wrote:Police in London say tough tactics used against suspected violent thieves on mopeds, including chasing them and knocking them off their bikes, have helped reduce crime.

The Metropolitan police claimed a 44% fall in thefts that involved mopeds or scooters since the tactics were adopted last year. These include providing officers with a special marking spray to fire at suspects; using remote-controlled spikes to burst the tyres of bikes; and using police cars to knock suspects off their bikes.

Police had been reluctant to chase mopeds, some driven by suspects as young as 14 at high speed, amid fears of injury or death.

But Insp Jim Corbett said those who thought they would not be chased if they took off their helmets were in for a surprise: “A big myth that we have is that if people remove their helmets they think they are not going to be pursued.”

He said officers were told be one person they caught: “I took my helmet off as I thought you would stop chasing me.”

The person, who was later jailed, rode on to the pavement where officers decided he was a danger to the public and decided to use what they call “tactical contact” , knocking him off his scooter.

A special team of “Scorpion” drivers have been trained in tactical contact. Policies were drawn up using legal experts to minimise the chances of officers being prosecuted for using the tactic, which was introduced in October 2017. This year police drivers have knocked suspects off their mopeds or scooters 63 times, including those who have taken off their helmets.

One Scorpion driver, Sgt Tony McGovern, said it was one of the hardest tactics to use: “It’s just a slight nudge. It’s controlled.” He said suspects were amazed when in some cases they were sent sprawling off their mopeds. “They are shocked and surprised. “They say ‘We did not think you were allowed to do that,’ especially when they take off their helmet. They are confused.”

He said other police cars would try to slow the scooter or moped before he and other specialist drivers strike at “as slow a speed as possible”. McGovern said police drivers aimed to minimise injury to those being pursued and civilians, so at impact they would take their foot off the accelerator and use the brakes to nudge the suspect off their bike. “It’s incredibly quick and very dynamic. Your decision-making changes in a split second.,” he said. Three incidents have been referred to the police watchdog for investigation.

The Met said last year 24% of their pursuits involved officers chasing mopeds or scooters. This year, that figure rose to 40%.

The issue of moped crime has been seen as part of a crimewave that made headlines and added to public unease about the prevalence of violence.

Hailing a fall in crime where mopeds were used, the Met said from January to October 2017 there were 19,455 offences across London. From January this year to October there were 12,419 offences.

Cdr Amanda Pearson said: “The public quite rightly expects us to intervene to keep London safe. Our highly trained police drivers weigh up the risks and decide upon the most appropriate tactics in those circumstances.

“Offenders on mopeds and motorcycles who attempt to evade the police are making a choice that puts themselves and others at risk. A lot of them get up and run away, looking aghast at how dare we.”

Several factors triggered the surge in robberies using mopeds from early 2017. One was a rise in people owning mopeds, coupled with security measures not being tough enough to stop them being stolen.

Mobile phones became lucrative for criminals to steal and the Met had previously said that Apple iPhones were the target in two-thirds of thefts, followed by Samsung Galaxies. Youths behind the thefts could make £2,000 an hour by getting £200 per phone they steal.

The crime spree is being driven by a market in spare phone parts, with some youths, all male, in some cases stealing makes of phone to order, and signs some offending was highly organised.

Initially Met chiefs did not see moped riding thieves as more than carrying out snatch robberies, driving by at speed to pluck a phone out of someone’s hand, with suspects even observed practising how they do it.

But then there was an increase in the levels of violence used plus growing public fear led police chiefs to develop and authorise tougher tactics.

Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs’ questions.

Damian Collins, the chair of the culture, media and sport select committee, invoked a rare parliamentary mechanism to compel the founder of a US software company, Six4Three, to hand over the documents during a business trip to London. In another exceptional move, parliament sent a serjeant at arms to his hotel with a final warning and a two-hour deadline to comply with its order. When the software firm founder failed to do so, it’s understood he was escorted to parliament. He was told he risked fines and even imprisonment if he didn’t hand over the documents.

YouGov wrote:Asia Bibi is a Pakistani Christian who was sentenced to death in Pakistan for blasphemy in 2010, but cleared on appeal by Pakistan's Supreme Court earlier this year. Her family have said that their lives are in danger and have appealed to Western countries, including Britain, to offer her asylum.

62% of Britons believe she should be offered asylum in the UK. 19% do not, and 19% Don't Know.

YouGov wrote:Are young people abandoning Labour?

Voting intention for the party among 18-24 year olds has fallen by 12 percentage points since the beginning of the year

While Labour supposedly enjoyed an upswell of support from young people at the 2017 general election – the so-called ‘youthquake’ – new YouGov data can reveal that it’s among this group that Labour has lost most support this year.

Voting intention for Labour has fallen five percentage points among all Britons since January, from 34% to 29% (although we should note that these figures, taken from the whole population, include those who tell us that they don’t intend to vote, or are unlikely to – hence why the figures are lower than our normal headline figures).

This trend is even more pronounced among young people, who are a key pillar of the party’s support. At the beginning of the year the majority of young people (56%) said they would vote Labour. Now the party is holding onto just 44% of the 18-24 year old vote - a decline of 12 percentage points.

The Conservatives do not seem to be the beneficiaries of this shift, however. Part of the movement is towards ‘don’t know’ or ‘will not vote’, while smaller parties also pick up a few percentage points here or there at Labour’s expense. Overall, the Conservatives have remained steady among the whole population, holding just over 30% share, and around 17% of the 18-24 year old vote.

Support for Jeremy Corbyn himself has also dropped in 2018. At the beginning of the year three in ten people (31%) said they thought Corbyn would make a better Prime Minister than Theresa May. This has since decreased to just a quarter of all adults (23%). Consequently, although the proportion of people who rate May more highly for the PM role has remained constant, her modest five-point lead in January had now increased to 13 points.

This decrease in support for Corbyn is, just as with Labour overall, more notable among young people. In January around half (51%) of 18-24 year olds said they would rather see the Labour leader in Number 10. However, our latest data shows that only 35% of 18-24 year olds still say the same - a decline of 16 percentage points.

Again, this does not necessarily constitute good news for the Conservatives, as almost none of these young Corbyn ‘deserters’ have switched to May. As with the population as a whole, the proportion of young people who say Theresa May is a better option for Prime Minister has held roughly constant throughout the year, at just below 20%.

Considering that Corbyn’s main competitor doesn’t seem to be benefitting from his loss in youth support, these results may be less troubling for him than they first appear. Outside of election campaigns, pollsters typically find that many respondents are unsure about how they would vote or their opinion of party leaders, so the move away from Corbyn could be temporary. There’s no reason to presume that these potential voters are totally lost to Labour and wouldn’t return when faced with another election.

John Allen Chau behaved immorally and recklessly when he approached North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal last week. A Christian from Washington in the US, Chau apparently wanted to convert the Sentinelese people to Christianity. The Sentinelese are a neolithic tribe that has had virtually no engagement with modernity. They’re notoriously hostile to outsiders. So when they saw Chau approaching in a kayak, they took fright and fired arrows at him. Chau died in a ‘hail of arrows’.

He must have known the risks. India, which oversees North Sentinel and surrounding islands, has outlawed contact with the Sentenilese people. As a result of having been secluded for thousands of years, the Sentinelese people probably lack genetic immunity to common ailments like flu and measles. Contact with people from the modern would could prove lethal for them. Chau wanted to save them for Jesus, but he could have ended up harming them terribly. His approach to the island was illegal and a grave moral error.

And yet, there is more humanity in his error, in his clumsy Christian zeal, in his desire to reach out to these people, than there is in the warped response to what he did. People are laughing at Chau. They’re denouncing him as a typical arrogant American. It would be better, eco-leftists and other luvvies insist, if we just left the Sentinelese people as they are. They’re probably happy. What, living brutish, backward lives? I think it is crueller to abandon the Sentinelese people to the fate written for them by the terrible quirks of geography and history than it is to try to contact and civilise them.

Yes, civilise them. ‘Civilise’ is seen as a terribly judgemental word these days. It conjures up images of Victorian colonialists venturing into the ‘heart of darkness’ in Africa and elsewhere and subjugating unwilling peoples to Biblical writ and British rule. But the civilisation instinct needn’t be a forced one. We could find ways to try to encourage the Sentinelese people, and the world’s other lost tribes, to exchange their unforgiving way of life for the more comfortable, knowledgable existences the rest of us enjoy. This may take a very long time, more than a generation perhaps, because it would need to be done patiently, carefully, and with an eye for informing the Sentinelese people of the world beyond their shores, rather than pressuring them or humiliating them in any way. But it is worth trying, surely?

Those laughing at Chau for his missionary folly seem content to leave a very small section of humanity — between 40 and 500 people, according to estimates — living in Stone Age conditions. It is unquestionable that the Sentinelese people live Stone Age lives. They are the world’s most remote tribe. They have remained largely unchanged for millennia. Throughout the Egyptian and Greek empires, the rise and fall of Rome, the emergence of the great religions, and the birth of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and industrialised modernity, they have carried on hunting with spears and living in huts. Through no fault of their own, they, and the rest of the world’s estimated 100 uncontacted tribes, are humankind’s losers. They deserve a chance to turn that around.

But backward-looking bourgeois people in the West, the green-leaning, modernity-loathing types who make up eco-aware circles, want to deprive tribes of that chance. They demand that we ‘leave tribes alone’, which really means abandoning them to a fate conjured up for them by the tectonic shifts or whims of forestation that led to their being cut off from the rest of us. Survival International, for example, a painfully PC campaign group that agitates for the preservation of tribal life, says the Sentinelese people ‘appear well’, and it insists that they, like other uncontacted tribes, should be left free of the ‘disastrous’ impact of progress.

‘Progress can kill’, Survival International says. Progress apparently means ‘HIV/AIDS… starvation… obesity… suicide… addiction’. Starvation and obesity? The message is clear: progress is bad, the tribal way of life is good; modernity rots the soul while living in huts and eking out a meagre existence from the sea and the forest keeps one in good spirits. Which makes you wonder why none of the West’s well-connected, self-elected defenders of tribespeople don’t up sticks and head out to a place like North Sentinel themselves.

There is an ugly streak of the ‘noble savage’ idea in all this. Feeling bored or exhausted with modern life, some eco-Westerners seem intent on bigging up the lifestyles of hidden, obscure tribes as a more authentic form of existence. It is their prejudices — against modernity, against Western civilisation itself — that drives their weird and paternalistic celebration of tribal life. In truth, there is nothing to celebrate in the exclusion of the Sentinelese people and other tribespeople from the gains of modernity, from the human family. Our common humanity demands that we make contact with these peoples and patiently try to convince them to become civilised.

Rax wrote:Each paragraph is worse than the last, the arrogance dripping off it is disgusting.

It's basically just the Victorian era idea of the white man's burden, going out there amongst the savages to spread wisdom and light. Never mind that they don't want to be "civilised" and would all die of disease, it's our duty as white men to ensure they die as Christians!

John Allen Chau behaved immorally and recklessly when he approached North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal last week. A Christian from Washington in the US, Chau apparently wanted to convert the Sentinelese people to Christianity. The Sentinelese are a neolithic tribe that has had virtually no engagement with modernity. They’re notoriously hostile to outsiders. So when they saw Chau approaching in a kayak, they took fright and fired arrows at him. Chau died in a ‘hail of arrows’.

He must have known the risks. India, which oversees North Sentinel and surrounding islands, has outlawed contact with the Sentenilese people. As a result of having been secluded for thousands of years, the Sentinelese people probably lack genetic immunity to common ailments like flu and measles. Contact with people from the modern would could prove lethal for them. Chau wanted to save them for Jesus, but he could have ended up harming them terribly. His approach to the island was illegal and a grave moral error.

And yet, there is more humanity in his error, in his clumsy Christian zeal, in his desire to reach out to these people, than there is in the warped response to what he did. People are laughing at Chau. They’re denouncing him as a typical arrogant American. It would be better, eco-leftists and other luvvies insist, if we just left the Sentinelese people as they are. They’re probably happy. What, living brutish, backward lives? I think it is crueller to abandon the Sentinelese people to the fate written for them by the terrible quirks of geography and history than it is to try to contact and civilise them.

Yes, civilise them. ‘Civilise’ is seen as a terribly judgemental word these days. It conjures up images of Victorian colonialists venturing into the ‘heart of darkness’ in Africa and elsewhere and subjugating unwilling peoples to Biblical writ and British rule. But the civilisation instinct needn’t be a forced one. We could find ways to try to encourage the Sentinelese people, and the world’s other lost tribes, to exchange their unforgiving way of life for the more comfortable, knowledgable existences the rest of us enjoy. This may take a very long time, more than a generation perhaps, because it would need to be done patiently, carefully, and with an eye for informing the Sentinelese people of the world beyond their shores, rather than pressuring them or humiliating them in any way. But it is worth trying, surely?

Those laughing at Chau for his missionary folly seem content to leave a very small section of humanity — between 40 and 500 people, according to estimates — living in Stone Age conditions. It is unquestionable that the Sentinelese people live Stone Age lives. They are the world’s most remote tribe. They have remained largely unchanged for millennia. Throughout the Egyptian and Greek empires, the rise and fall of Rome, the emergence of the great religions, and the birth of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and industrialised modernity, they have carried on hunting with spears and living in huts. Through no fault of their own, they, and the rest of the world’s estimated 100 uncontacted tribes, are humankind’s losers. They deserve a chance to turn that around.

But backward-looking bourgeois people in the West, the green-leaning, modernity-loathing types who make up eco-aware circles, want to deprive tribes of that chance. They demand that we ‘leave tribes alone’, which really means abandoning them to a fate conjured up for them by the tectonic shifts or whims of forestation that led to their being cut off from the rest of us. Survival International, for example, a painfully PC campaign group that agitates for the preservation of tribal life, says the Sentinelese people ‘appear well’, and it insists that they, like other uncontacted tribes, should be left free of the ‘disastrous’ impact of progress.

‘Progress can kill’, Survival International says. Progress apparently means ‘HIV/AIDS… starvation… obesity… suicide… addiction’. Starvation and obesity? The message is clear: progress is bad, the tribal way of life is good; modernity rots the soul while living in huts and eking out a meagre existence from the sea and the forest keeps one in good spirits. Which makes you wonder why none of the West’s well-connected, self-elected defenders of tribespeople don’t up sticks and head out to a place like North Sentinel themselves.

There is an ugly streak of the ‘noble savage’ idea in all this. Feeling bored or exhausted with modern life, some eco-Westerners seem intent on bigging up the lifestyles of hidden, obscure tribes as a more authentic form of existence. It is their prejudices — against modernity, against Western civilisation itself — that drives their weird and paternalistic celebration of tribal life. In truth, there is nothing to celebrate in the exclusion of the Sentinelese people and other tribespeople from the gains of modernity, from the human family. Our common humanity demands that we make contact with these peoples and patiently try to convince them to become civilised.